Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

The sun was climbing fast by the time he reached the Sea View, heating up the streets, and the machinery of the town was heating up as well, moving into high gear now, the boomer gear, greased with hash oil and cocoa butter, hotwired with cocaine, chugging to some New Wave anthem, and his heart was beating time, hammering erratically as he reached his room and stepped inside. What he knew for certain, leaning against his doorjamb, staring into the shabby room, was that he was not the same person who had stood there the night before.

“Some like ’em skinny, some like ’em round, can’t tell the difference when they’re upside down.” It was a song Gordon’s brother used to sing. Once, at the shop in King City, Ike had walked in on Jerry and one of his friends while they were fucking some girl. It had been out back, in the storage shed, and the girl had been on her knees, Jerry in back, the other guy in front, and Ike could still remember how the shed had been hot and close, charged with a strange odor, and how he’d run, back across the dirt yard and into the shop, his teeth chattering while Jerry’s laughter hung on the air. And later that night in the shack back of Gordon’s, he had imagined it all over again, certain that what he’d seen that afternoon would be as mysterious forever as it was just then.

Funny how everything had changed, how what was once so strange was now so familiar. What had once seemed a mystery without clues was now a puzzle solved with such pitiful ease that there were times when the whole process just seemed stupid and boring. And there were times when he felt that he was full up with something, some feeling in his guts he could never puke away.

He didn’t know. At first, after that night with the redhead, he had tried not to fuck them, just to recruit them for the parties, sad stupid little girls. And he had laughed at himself for ever thinking there was more to it, something magical, even, and he both wished back the magic and sneered at himself for ever having believed it there. And most of the time it turned out to be too hard not to fuck them. When he was skulled, half crocked. He wanted to fuck them then, from the top, the back, the bottom, like putting moves together across the face of a wave.

Frank Baker had been right about paying for the board. It was not a simple thing, locked as it was into the Process, woven into the design of the Machine. “It’s not the money,” Hound had told him, “but the spirit in the giving.” And so even though he was on the payroll now, and Hound paid him well enough, it was hard to know about that board. Mornings were still spent with the dawn patrol, in the shadows of the old pier. Then it was home for breakfast and back into bed, only this time the bed was Michelle’s. And then it was back to the shop, or down to the beach with a pocketful of Hound Adam’s dope and an eye out for the girls, down in the hot sand and maybe a noseful of coke, because he had discovered where Hound Adams found the energy to party all night and surf all day.

He learned other things about Hound as well. He noticed, for instance, that Hound never made it with any of the girls. He was always there, watching, but never taking part. Still, it was Hound who decided when there would be parties and when there would be movies, and he was fairly picky, Ike learned, about the girls he used for the films. He liked having a lot to choose from, but there was only a handful who were encouraged to stay, or to come back. And if something got started with a girl who didn’t like it, or who freaked, Hound would call it quits right away and he would make sure the girl got calmed down before she left. What had happened that first night, with the redhead, was an exception and nothing like it had happened since. But Hound had slipped up that night. He had come close to blowing it very badly and he had been scared, and Ike had seen it.

The incident had proven to Ike that Hound was mortal, that he could screw up, but nothing had come of it. That was an odd word—nothing. There were times when he repeated the word to himself, as if testing it for shape and weight. He would think about it in connection with those weeks he had now spent in the service of Hound Adams. Certain questions presented themselves. The questions were obvious and had to do with his search for Ellen, revenge for Preston’s maiming. The answers were more obscure and much of the time it seemed enough for him simply to say that things were not the same. Because for him they were not. Something had gone out of him and with its leaving, something had changed. It was as if those stakes he had once imagined had been tampered with once again. There were days at a time now when he did not even think of his sister, and when he did, he thought of her in new ways. It was like he had seen too many things. He could still not believe the kind of girls he’d met on the pier, and at the parties, girls you could do anything to and watch them crawl back for more, girls who would let the Jacobs brothers slap them around and fuck them in the ass and still be back the next day giving head for a line of coke. It had been two years now since he’d seen Ellen and he would think of that day she had gone, how she’d walked right past him without so much as a good-bye, and how he’d seen her out there on the edge of town in her dust-caked boots and tight jeans, waiting to flag down some trucker, and he would think maybe it was like Gordon had said. He would think about those nights in the desert, alone, Ellen out on a date, partying somewhere beyond the dark boundaries of the town. Partying. The word had a new meaning for him now.

He didn’t always like himself for thinking those things, but he thought them anyway. He couldn’t help it. Maybe it was her karma. And maybe what had happened to Preston was his karma, too. All he knew for certain was that his perspective had shifted, that the summer was slipping away and that what he had come for was slipping away with it, joining itself to another place and time, a place and time that seemed to him more foreign and more distant by the day, less connected to the person he had become. It was as if some piece of himself had fallen away—or perhaps some former shell; he was like a snake shedding skin.

But then the easiest thing was not to think about it at all. The easiest thing was just to let it slide, to make it work for you and not let it get you bummed. And so that was what he did. He stayed stoned and he surfed and he watched it all go by. He became a spectator at the zoo, as Preston had once called it, that collection of crazies on land and on sea. And sometimes, on warm summer evenings when the air was soft and laced with the scent of the sea, he would collect young ladies and make movies for Hound Adams. There was, as Hound had once told him, nothing to it. And it might have gone on that way for a long time. It might have gone on that way for too long and the summer might have slipped away altogether had not something come along to end it. Something did. It began when Preston Marsh returned to Huntington Beach.

He had been gone for over a month. There were various wild rumors that had been circulated: He’d lost his hands, his arms from the elbows down. Been brain-damaged and sent to some veteran’s home, a vegetable for life. Or that he had just cleared out, had enough of H.B. and split for good. Ike was not sure what to believe. Earlier, toward the middle of July, he’d been back to the hospital and found Preston gone. He had tried a couple of times to get hold of Barbara, but she seemed to have disappeared too. Still, he did not think they were gone for good. On his two visits to the duplex he found a growing stack of yellowed newspapers on the front porch, drawn curtains, and a side yard thick with weeds. Obviously there were no new tenants. So he listened to the rumors, and he wondered, left it to the workings of karma, and went his own way. And then one day there he was, Preston Marsh, standing on the sidewalk and staring into the Main Street Surf Shop.